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In an Altered State (Part 2)

Awake

Finally I may be awake.

I step from the bus into another car
park. The landscape around me is
red. Red soil, red stones, red pillars
and cliffs. If it were painted, it would
look unreal.

The red rocks of Sedona spring from the
ground with a rough edged, youthful kind of enthusiasm. Not for them the well rounded, whale back
lines of other, older, landscapes. Of
course, the formation of the red cliffs, pillars and domes has taken a time
unconnected to a single life and the rocks themselves are 300 million years
old. Geology relies on numbers with
vapour trails of zeros, numbers that drift off towards a failure of
understanding. Numbers that simply stack
oldness upon oldness.

But the sharp lines of the land show that
it is still active and alive, that its geology is not dormant, that process is
overcoming permanence. Sedona sits on a
great plateau that is being pushed upwards from below. As the land grows higher, the forces of
erosion and weathering cut it back down, creating the sharp edges and steep
slopes. Here the land may rise an inch
in a human lifetime. It’s a landscape that, geologically speaking, is sprinting
into the sky. It’s a landscape that
shows how deep time and small changes can cause remarkable things.

It’s also a landscape on to which people
seem compelled to force meaning, but not necessarily understanding.

Even before we get out of the bus, our
guide is talking about Earth Energy, crystals and vortexes. I feel my spirits sag. Sure, the domes of rock are impressive, and
they do take on the form of giant funnels – or even the swirl of water as it
disappears down the plughole of a bath.
But to explain these shapes in the landscape through spinning centres of
energy, some coming up from the depths of the Earth, others retuning form
whence it came, seems a step beyond credible imagination. It seems to be an explanation that reaches
for significance, but fails to bring meaning, and in doing so, overlooks the
simple grain at a time reality of geology.
I am unsure if the other passengers on the bus feel as I do. In that
situation I take the easy – if possibly cowardly – way out; I walk away and
stay silent.

Maybe it’s the ghost of a bad night’s
sleep, maybe it’s the lack of my own family rudder, but I feel adrift. (There is, of course, the possibility that
negative Earth energy could be corrupting my aura, but I consider that
unlikely.) The landscape is remarkable, but I keep finding things that sit
between it and me. Human things. Imposed things. Things that take away my attention. Back at the bus the guide names the rocks
around us: Courthouse, Cathedral, Capitol, Bell. All but one are named for agents of control –
maybe even repression – as if somebody has tried to take a landscape and make
it their own, knowing deep down that it was somebody else’s first. It was done in Australia, and it seems to
have been done here too. If you wipe
away the memory of all that went before, in your mind you have a clean slate,
to claim as your own. And in an empty
land, it’s easy to ignore the people who were there first. The landscape is
beautiful, one I would love to explore, but my thoughts are unsettling. I feel like an uncharitable guest, a
conclusion jumper on an air-conditioned day tour.

And then things get worse.

Before we enter the main strip of Sedona,
we turn off for Chapel of the Holy Cross.
Seen from below the chapel is a concrete building, with a coffin shaped
outer skin, and an inner skeleton of a single cross. Initially the building seems intriguing, but
then a series of dark connections start to form in my mind. The guidebook says that the Chapel “sits
upon” two small red-rock domes. But to
my mind the better words would be “sits within”. The visual connection between crosses and
swords is clear for all to see – the handle, guards and blade of a sword form a
perfect cross. And here in this
building, the blade of the sword is being driven into stone beneath it. If the shape and form of these rocks did
mean (or does mean) something to people, then this seems to be nothing short of
symbolic murder, or at least, assault.

As a kid I would often visit the town of Glastonbury
in the green of the Somerset countryside, another town rich in crystal readings
and talk of energy. But it is also an
epicentre of things Arthurian – the man-myth who became King by removing a
sword from a stone. In Sedona, a culture
becomes king by driving a sword into a stone.

On the pathway to the chapel, people make
exclamations of faith, and stop to throw money on to the surrounding stones in
the hope of influencing the future.
Around the edges of the ancient pathways that lead towards Glastonbury,
archaeologists find concentrations of coins, jewellery and bladed weapons,
thrown into the long gone waters, presumably in the hope of influencing the
future too. Ancient rituals and modern
faith. Pagan ritual on the way to
church.

On a sharp corner, below the chapel, cars
and vans park so that people can use the two portable toilets that have been
placed there because there are none at the chapel itself. At the top of the hill one thing happens and
at the bottom of the hill, it’s something else.

By the time we leave the chapel I need time
and space. A place to think. A place to stop thinking. A place that does not feel like I am standing
downstream of a bad idea. A place to look for the things that make sense to me;
I go looking for water.

Oak Creek and its self made canyon run
through Sedona like a breath of fresh air. Although homes and hotels flanked
the part of it I saw, it was mercifully free from signs and symbols. There was only a single sign that read “No
Trespassing”. It had been shot through
at least ten times. I struggled to know
if that itself was a good or a bad thing.

The river was so clear that only the
turbulence at the surface betrayed the water’s presence. A gap in the clouds let the Sun peek through
to show each and every grain on the tumbled rocks on the riverbed. I hoped for fish, but found ducks and squirrels
instead. American Widgeon whistled to
each other as they gathered in the hope of thrown snacks, and further upstream
a pair of Wood Duck – the male richly coloured and ornate – cast suspicious
glances at me before taking flight. A
squirrel splayed its legs around a tree trunk as it paused to watch me. Tail flicks and high-pitched chattering
suggested he was not best pleased to see me.
The feeling was not mutual. Many of last year’s leaves were still fluffy
packed between the water washed stones on the bank – I could feel another
Webber B fracture in the offing. A large
rounded stone – maybe even a boulder – offered safety, rest and a patch of
sunlight. I accepted them all. Small lizards, a surprise in the valley
chill, emerged from hiding to sit in the sunshine too. There were still no fish.

Clouds moved at speed across the sky,
shedding their sea-born loads, eager to get somewhere else. The water in the river was slowly gaining
colour, its deeper parts hiding the bed.
It must have been raining upstream all morning.

The path back up from the water opened the
view of the whole creek, dense with trees, flanked by steep cliffs. Thick banks of cloud gathered around the
valley edge and threatened rain. My
mother would have said the blue-grey clouds promised snow. Later in the afternoon she would have be
proved to be correct.

I had entered Sedona feeling a kind of
pressure building in me. The kind of
pressure that comes when people ask you questions you don’t want to answer
truthfully. A conflict between the role
of the guest and the role of self, where you have little right to impose your
opinions, but failing to do so feels dishonest.
It’s a fine line to tread.
Internally I stray, my face probably an open book.

In the last patch of vegetation before I
return to the car park a jewelled flash of life lands on a branch in front of
me. It’s an Anna’s Humming Bird. This is no silhouette of a bird, but a full
view. Metallic feathers. Sparkling colours. A tongue that seems to be licking its needle
beak, seeking a last drop of nectar. I
don’t know who Anna was, but her bird sits for no more than ten perfect
seconds, departing in a blur of wing buzz speed.

Each to their own. I found what I was looking for down by the
creek, in the noisy silence of a dry leaf woodland, slowly waking from winter. I found it in the threat of spring snow. In chance encounters with birds, squirrels and
sun hungry lizards. I took away more
than I left, and while no place is unchanged by our presence, I doubt that the
next person to walk that path would know I had been there. The next visitors can make of it what they
will, but they don’t need me, or my signs or symbols. Whatever fine line I was walking has
broadened.

By the time I reach the car park, some
sense of balance has been restored.

Alert

As the bus winds up road, the morning rains
wash down the creek to towards us. The
water time travels through the landscape and gives a glimpse into the
future. As the water browns and rises, a
heron is flushed from the creek, and inexplicably lands on the road in front of
us. It’s a bird defined by length,
spindly and fine. It looks at the bus along the length of its beak and takes
flight to a more fishy location. Heavy
rain pounds the windows and the road runs with water. Maybe the heron knew what it was doing.

I notice the bus has no windscreen wipers.
The rain is being pushed by the speed of the wind, beading and flowing upwards
and outwards, taking some kind of water repelling substance with it. Another residue being added to the soil and
water we all share. Another
complication, produced to save us from the toil of flicking a switch cunningly
hidden behind the steering wheel. I feel
the line thinning, and turn to watch the rain become snow.

There is little conversation within the bus;
the grey of the sky seems to have seeped through the windows and doors. The snow becomes heavier but then suddenly
stops. We stop to look a small
waterfall, but drive past a rock arch.
The uncertain weather tries its hand once more at rain.

Eventually we pull into a car park next to
some heavy wooden buildings. A common
Raven looks up from its exploration of a litterbin. Even with the bus door open, the only sound
is silence. I get out and, appropriately enough, turn my collar to the cold and
damp. I know where I am but I don’t
really believe it. How can what we have
come to see still be hidden? How can the
most famous hole in the ground, a canyon so large it really is Grand, be just
over there, but still out of sight?

A slight rise leads away from the car park
towards a waist high rough stonewall.
The raven waits on the wall, watching a second tumble through the
air. The airborne bird flashes below the
level of the wall, flying too fast to avoid the collision with the ground that
never comes. It reappears at the same time as my line of sight passes the top
of the wall. Void. Air. Absence. A deep space where logic would tell
you none should be. The trick of
perspective hides the Grand Canyon until you are nearly on top of it, nearly in
it, and reveals it like a surprise. You
know it’s going to be huge, and you know when you are going to see it, but the
rush of revelation is shock. It goes from
hidden to visible in a few footfalls. If
the contours were reversed, so that the Earth had been thrown up rather than
worn down, you would have been seeing for hours; the skyline, and maybe even
gravity itself, would have been buckled by the presence on the horizon.

But you stand there, feeling the tug of
vertigo, secretly thankful for the litigation preventing wall and stare through
sky where there should be land. And down
below, in the canyon base, you catch a glimpse of the Colorado River, robbed of
the colour that gave it its name by the stillness upstream. A small thing, green and clear. A river tamed by dams, and human
slowness. A river that, in the past, cut
down and through layer after layer of rock, down to some ancient foundation, hard
enough to resist. A river that, a grain
at a time, formed the Grand Canyon.

If in carelessness, or deep sadness, you
stepped from the stonewall and out into space, you would fall down through the
long history of the Earth, travelling the layered time machine of the stacked
strata until, with brutal suddenness, you would come to sudden halt at rocks
laid down almost 2 billion years ago. A
collision of the two concrete realities that drive the world – geology and
physics. You would have fallen through a
time scale as unimaginable as the terror of the fall itself. The exposure of such rocks and the creation
of such a landscape, would be impossible without the same time unimaginable and
a river, cutting down as the land rises up to meet it, shifting the world from one place to another one
grain at a time.

It is in such places as this that the
beauty of simplicity is revealed.

In such places there is a need for the
company of the ones you love. In the
face of the simple scale and extent of world you can feel small and alone
without a hand to hold, without a flash of red hair or a disbelieving look,
changing into a startled smile. With
camera in hand I do my best to capture the fleeting surprise, the startled air
of a place so big. Deep down I know this
is probably futile.

Above the canyon the sky seems stretched
thin, like a response to the presence of air where there should be Earth. Weak sunshine pulls distant faces close, and
darkness pushes the close further away.
Above me the roulette of weather rests briefly on fine. Soon the snow starts again. Soon the cold returns with a sharp wind. Too soon, we have to leave.

The
possibility of sleep

When we pull over again we are on the edge
of another desert. Not the desert with
cartoon perfect cactus we had passed through this morning, but one painted with
soft light, cut through by the straight lines of wires and fences, rising to a
horizon smoked with cloud. What grass
there is, grown from a flush of September rain, has been baked down to a pale
yellow brown. Wind blown fragments hang
on wire fences and twist in the sharp wind.
The sand at my feet has a slight cast of red, and is studded with
hundreds of pebbles, some of which were crystals, clear and shiny.

The late afternoon light is low and
metallic, gold and copper. The crystals
shine. Moving your head from side to
side makes them sparkled. I pick up a fistful of sand and let it flow through
my fingers. The pebbles rattle as I
shake my hand. The sky is wonderful, but
I was still looking at the ground. I
roll the pebbles in my hand – most are rounded – and that’s what attracted my
attention. Round stones means
water. In the desert. A long, long time ago.

I tip my hand to the side and the stones
slide off and fall back to the sandy ground.
People notice what I am doing and look at the ground too – eager hands started
collecting the crystals. I wish they had
not noticed.

I step away to look at the sky. It’s
huge. Storm clouds push from one side,
the sun from another. Wires that sing in
the wind also catch the last of the light.
I lie on the ground to see the sky.
When I stand up I brush the sand from my hand; desert sand, water sand.

Back in the van, people curl up as best
they can to sleep. I wonder what will
happen to the collected stones. I wonder
how many will end up pushed to the back of cupboards in fragile plastic bags,
forgotten, or ignored.

There is
still sand on my hands. I roll the grains between my thumb and first finger
until they fall to the floor, one grain at a time.

Out of the window the landscape flickers,
flashes and merges. The close is rapid,
the distant still. A fleeing earth, a
constant sky. A parallax warped
vision. I think about the day, one
grainy flicker frame at a time.

It would soon be dark. A long day was ending. A strange and good day was ending.

Hari OMBeen waiting for the next ep! Am in total accord with your take on the architecture; and faith is required by Man en masse no matter what that faith calls itself... like faith, energy exists but suffers from interpretation.

I wonder, too, if part of what was happening was 'tourist fatigue'; something I know I endured on the first OZ trip as I am much more the pioneer adventurer type and being stuck with a bus load of gawpers and souvenir hunters was perhaps not my favourite thing.

That said, you clearly treasure each moment paying due and ready attention. Lucky us!! YAM xx

The first time I went to Sedona was for New Years Eve about 15 years ago...there was a dusting of snow on the red rock, all around us...it was gorgeous!!! And yes, I heard all the stories of the energy vortexes and could swear I felt a difference!!! When I went there with my husband about 6 years ago, his comment was..."Wow...I really feel...normal!!!" The first time I visited, I got "Red Rock Fever" and started looking at potential jobs there...I was at a point in my life where I wanted a change and the Red Rocks drew me...I never did make that change, and I'm glad now...but I'm still drawn by the Red Rock...

Your longer written posts are always well worth the time, Stewart. I enjoyed this tour with you, and felt a deep understanding & appreciation for your reactions along the way.I've only traveled the SouthWest once - an excursion that covered parts of Nevada, southern Utah, and Arizona. We were on the north rim side of the Grand Canyon, inaccessible at the time of our presence due to 9 ft. of snow blocking the roads in. The south rim is the way to go, but it's a long way around. Too long for the time frame we had available. We enjoyed so much incredible natural beauty in the National Parks of Utah, and at the end of our trip before going home, we ended up at the Hoover Dam.. Man made wonder, that left me nearly suffering culture shock & depression at what humans have done to the Colorado River, changing it to suit them and ridiculous (is despicable too harsh a word?) desert cities like Las Vegas & all of it's foolish waste. Assault on the earth, and "Pagan rituals on the way to church." Your way with words & imagery is profound. You really hit home with your point on such landmark experiences as the Grand Canyon needing the company of the ones you love. To share them. The indescribable. My mother went on a cross country journey last year on her own, hiking parks & so on solo as she went.. and I couldn't help but think - wouldn't it be better to see these amazing sights WITH someone? They say a joy shared is a joy doubled. I compared her situation to seeing a moose here in our area.. We see them often when we travel to northern Ontario, but most locals only see them a couple times in a lifetime, if that. They're here, they just have abundant forests & swamps to stay hidden in. But seeing a moose is always much better when you have someone with you who can back you up as to what cool creatures they are. ;) I'm glad the day came full circle for you. Thank you for sharing (and sharing so well!)

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, having visited Sedona several times, from the days almost forty years ago when it was truly magnificent, I was seriously disillusioned when I last visited about five years ago. Land speculators from California have developed so much land and the town of Sedona itself has become the tee shirt and baseball capital of the west. If I never return again, it will not sadden me.

This is such a gorgeous area of the country. I am a nervous flyer, but mustered up enough courage to take a plane ride over the Grand Canyon a few years ago and it was breathtaking. I love reading your narrative and your pictures are beautiful!

It is entirely amazing all the different landscapes throughout the world . We of course don't see those red rock sights here in New England , but I was fortunate enough to see similar when I lived out West.Thank you for this lovely share of gorgeous photos and great commentary .

Where do I begin, Stewart? I wish I had time to sit and chat with you about all of this. You bring your Arthurian-inspired soul to my corner of the planet where people claim mystical experiences amid the desert rock formations. I have to admit I haven't made it to Sedona yet, but all that crystal nonsense annoys me no end. I think I would have felt the same way you did on the bus. On the other hand, neither have I been to most areas of Britain but the deep prehistoric beginnings of the Arthurian legend and archaeoastronomy fascinate me, and I have always longed explore the sites that so inspire me!

Here you also approach our wonderful Grand Canyon with a spiritual reverence that I can totally understand, and feel akin to. The photos are wonderful! You remind me of my 10-day Ireland tour by bus after jet-lag, with your need to sleep. How I connected with you as you tell us of this marvelous day! Loved this post so much!